The Doctor's Bride

Zack looked up to see his mom blinking back tears. He hadn’t done anything that special. Maybe she was glad he still knew how to pray.

“That was a beautiful prayer, son,” his mother said. “The best gift a mother can receive is knowing her child has a relationship with God.”

Temporarily flushed by his mother’s praise, Zack cleared the lump in his throat and said, “When I planned this dinner for you, Mom, I had no idea that your favorite conference speaker would turn out to be our new friend, Chloe, or that Chloe’s sister would be my old friend, Carmen.”

“‘Old?’” Carmen protested playfully. “Watch it!”

“Sorry,” he said with a grin. “It’s great that such a cool coincidence brought us together.”

“It is wonderful that we’re together!” Bonnie agreed. “But I would say it was more God’s direction than coincidence. When I look back over my life, I see how often I thought God wasn’t hearing my prayers, but He was. Often the bad times were preparation for the good things God had ahead for me.”

Zack bit his tongue as he always did when she talked about this. He loved her too much to mention she’d chosen to stay with his dad and go through those bad times. He’d finally gotten away after high school, but not without guilt because he’d left Mom to serve her sentence. That was how he thought of her life with Dad.

“I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have faith that God has my best interest at heart,” Mom said, her sweet face fervent with her belief.

Carmen nodded her head in understanding. “Since Chloe’s been back home, I have to confess, some of her faith is rubbing off on me.” Carmen gave Chloe a sisterly squeeze on her arm.

Zack tried not to show his surprise. What was Carmen talking about? She’d always had faith—the same kind he had. It might be faith on a more generic level than his mother or Chloe seemed to have, but he believed in a Higher Power. Sometimes his patients lived when his skills hadn’t been enough.

“Hey, everybody.” Collin Brennan stopped by their table.

Zack stood to shake Collin’s hand and whispered in his ear, “Don’t mention our surgery this morning.”

Collin gave him a questioning look, but blinked agreement.

“Mom,” he said with a hand on her shoulder, “This is Collin Brennan, grandson of the founder of Brennan Medical Clinic where I have my office. Collin has an office there, too, and we both do our surgeries at Cedar Hills Hospital.”

Color drained from her face—alarmingly so.

“I understand it’s your birthday, Mrs. Hemingway, and I want to add my good wishes,” Collin said with his usual charm, but he looked at Zack, silently inquiring about her sudden paleness.

“Thank you, Collin.” Mom stared at Collin as if she couldn’t look away.

What was wrong with Mom?

Carmen and Chloe greeted Collin like the old friends they were. Chloe leaned toward his mother and said, “Our father and Collin’s uncle Albert were roommates at Stanford in their undergrad days. We’ve grown up together.”

“Collin’s an anesthesiologist, Bonnie,” Carmen added. “In fact he worked with Zack this morning on their celebrity patient.”

Collin gave Zack a look as if to say he hadn’t blabbed.

“Did anyone catch Zack on TV?” Carmen asked.

“You were on TV?” his mother asked.

“When our patients are celebrities,” Zack explained, “the media always wants details. Meeting with them is the worst part of my job. The cameras, the mikes in your face—I feel like a deer caught in headlights.”

“And get this,” Collin said, leaning down and dropping his voice, “Zack suggested that your dad, as chief of surgery, do the interview, but…our new PR guy shut your dad down.”

“He didn’t!” Carmen’s dark eyes were wide with awe.

“Oh, but he did. The guy said, ‘Dr. Kilgannon, the public needs a bright, young doctor like Dr. Hemingway to put a face to the excellence that is Cedar Hills Hospital.’”

“How did Dad take it?” Carmen asked.

Collin rolled his eyes. “If it had been anyone but Zack to take the spotlight, your dad would have stroked out, but Zack’s his boy.”

Zack didn’t know what he’d done to gain Sterling Kilgannon’s favor, but he’d had it from the moment he’d taken an office at Brennan Medical Clinic.

“Since Zack was running late, I offered to do the media interview. I was the anesthesiologist, and I’m a ‘bright, young doctor,’ but your dad said I looked too much like a soap-opera actor for the public to take seriously.” Collin flashed a brilliant, TV-worthy smile. “Can you believe it?”

“Yes!” the sisters said in chorus.

“Collin, do you take after your father or your mother?” Zack’s mom asked.

“I can answer that,” Chloe chimed in. “Collin is blond, blue-eyed and good-looking like his dad, but he has his mother’s good sense.”

That was a nice way of putting it. Collin’s dad was a notorious womanizer and not a man Zack could admire.

“Since it’s already been on the news,” Chloe said, “your patient’s identity isn’t confidential. May we ask who it was?”

Collin looked at Zack, clearly leaving that answer up to him.

“Madison Haines,” Zack said.

“Madison Haines!” His mom almost came out of her chair. “What happened?”